Generating Invoices with Airtable

Creating invoices can be tedious for micro-business owners and small businesses. Today, I will show you how to implement a process to generate seamless invoices in PDF thanks to Airtable and Typeflow.us.

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Why Should you use Airtable for generating invoices?

Airtable looks like a spreadsheet. But behind its sleek UI, it hides the power of a database. But what does it mean exactly?

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- Centralized Data Management

You can store all your data in one place. You can create one table per data type, such as customers, items or products, invoice data, etc., and then link those tables together.

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- Automation

Airtable allows you to implement automation. It integrates with many software, so it's possible to streamline many tedious tasks like generating invoices automatically or sending invoices via email.

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- Integration with Google Docs templates to generate invoices

With Typeflow.us, invoices can be generated based on a Google Docs template. Typeflow integrates natively with Airtable, so generating invoices will be easy.

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Setting up the Airtable base

You can use the Airtable base we prepared for you. You will have a table for your users and products for that one.

This template includes all the necessary fields and structure to manage your invoices effectively:

• Different table for each category of data - one for users, one for products
• Integrates all the fields needed to generate invoices properly
• You will also find linked records between the Users table and the Product table, so you can easily generate the invoice. Ready-to-use formulas and validations
• You have an attachment field for the future invoices generated.
• You can also find a button field to generate PDFs.

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Setting Up Typeflow

You can use this invoice template from Typeflow.us.

It has all the variables to generate an invoice. Of course, feel free to adapt it.

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Then, you will be able to map the data between the Airtable fields and the Google Docs variable.

When done, you can import the link to the button field. Now, whenever you want to generate PDFs for specific users, click the button.

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Going further with Airtable Automation

It's also possible to generate PDFs automatically, thanks to automation.

1. Go to automation
2. Select one trigger to run your automation.
3. Select Run a script
4. Past the script from Typeflow (from automation Script).
5. Create a variable named record_id() with the value Airtable Record ID on the left side.
6. Then you can run whatever you want as the next step, like emailing.

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Just try our product by filling this form. You will receive by email a - fake - invoice generated by Typeflow based on the data you give.